Canada's Supreme Court to review landmark prostitution ruling

Canada’s top court has announced it will review a lower court decision that gave Ontario’s sex workers the legal right to work in brothels and hire bodyguards and drivers. The development has great significance because when the Supreme Court of Canada issues its final ruling, it will apply across the country.

OTTAWA — Canada’s top court has announced it will review a lower court decision that gave Ontario’s sex workers the legal right to work in brothels and hire bodyguards and drivers. The development has great significance because when the Supreme Court of Canada issues its final ruling, it will apply across the country.

The court announced Thursday morning it will hear the federal government’s appeal of a landmark lower-court ruling last March that said some of the country’s anti-prostitution rules placed unconstitutional restrictions on prostitutes’ ability to protect themselves.

The Attorney General of Canada’s application for leave to appeal was granted without costs. The court will also hear a cross-appeal by three former and current sex workers that allows them to argue that the rest of the prostitution laws they had challenged are also unconstitutional.

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The Ontario court’s previous decision will be stayed until the court hands down a judgment in the appeal and cross-appeal, the Supreme Court said.

The decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal earlier this year allowed sex workers in Ontario to hire drivers, bodyguards and to work indoors in organized brothels, or “bawdy houses,” to make their work safer. It continued to be illegal to openly solicit customers on the street, with the court seeing that as a “reasonable limit on the right to freedom of expression.”

Exploitation by pimps also remained illegal.

The federal government applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court on May 25, according to court documents. And the respondents — former and current sex workers Terri-Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott — applied for a cross-appeal a month later.

In March, the Ontario court gave the federal government one year to change the prostitution laws in the Criminal Code. While the Ontario ruling only applied to that province, a decision by the Supreme Court would apply nationwide.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said in April that the federal government believes the Criminal Code provisions on prostitution are “constitutionally sound.”

“It is important to clarify the constitutionality of the law and remove the uncertainty this decision has created,” Nicholson said at the time.

“The Criminal Code provisions denounce and deter the most harmful and public aspects of prostitution.”